The second most popular TV show in the country, “American Nightmare,” is set in Mare Island, California, not far from Benicia, the seaside town where I worked as a cub reporter. The three-part series has received accolades aplenty, most of which have to do with the second half. I understand the appeal of the series’ misdirection of viewers, but “American Nightmare” struck me as overpraised.

Its chief theme was noted nearly eighty years ago by none other than George Orwell.

The premise of “American Nightmare” is compelling. In 2015, a young (white) woman in a struggling relationship went missing and showed up two days later. Was the abduction a real-life reprise of the 2014 film “Gone Girl”? A spoiler alert: The female protagonist faked her kidnapping to get revenge on her cheating husband.

Now for another spoiler alert: No, this female protagonist, Denise Huskins, did not stage her own abduction. She was abducted. Like others no doubt, my wife and I were surprised. We thought given her sad history and strained relationship, she, too, had faked her kidnapping.

She didn’t.

A man by the name of Matthew Muller had abducted and raped her. Mr. Muller wasn’t just any Joe Blow, but a former Marine and graduate of Harvard Law School. He had done this sort of thing before. Almost as bad, the Vallejo police not only bungled the case but denounced the rape victim.

The series holds viewers’ interest, is edited judiciously, and is even classy for a tawdry genre like true crime. Call me scrupulous, but I disagree with those who called the series “fascinating” or  “exceptional.”

At the heart of the crime was a professional-class man driven by lust to commit crime. This is nothing new. In his 1946 essay “The Decline of the English Murder,” Mr. Orwell identified the same theme running through British murder mysteries. As he noted,

The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbors to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail.

His summary described what happened in “American Nightmare” more or less. The exceptions were that Mr. Muller was not married and did not commit murder.

The implicit message of “American Nightmare” is progressive: the police are not to be trusted, even professional men are predators, and adult women are to be believed. Those takeaways have become conventional wisdom in the wake of the me-too movement, and justifiably so in many cases.

But that’s different from saying “American Nightmare”s point of view is original and challenges its audience. A truly compelling story would have broken thematic ground.

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